Documentary

I Believe In Miracles

Director: Jonny Owen (2015)

Revisiting one of the more endearing successes in English football, this celebratory documentary has a joyous end of season feel to it.

A shameless and entertaining nostalgia trip, fabulous footage of Nottingham Forest’s fluid football is married to a soul music soundtrack to fun effect while former players contribute well practised anecdotes

It’s an energetic telling of the well trod tale of how maverick manager Brian Clough utterly transformed the fortunes of struggling Nottingham Forest FC.

And the Middlesbrough-born maestro did it in only five years.

Having made Derby County FC unlikely champions of England before falling foul as the boss of Leeds United, we begin in 1974 with a televised Teesside tiff between the unemployed Clough and the England boss Don Revie.

The next season Clough took charge at The City Ground and dragged the struggling team from the lower end of the domestic second tier to become 1980 European champions.

And to prove it wasn’t a fluke, Clough lead his team to a second European Cup triumph the following year as well.

Rather than trying to cover every blade of contextual grass, a route one approach focuses on the players’ experience as John Robertson, Viv Anderson, Martin O’Neil and others contribute well practiced anecdotes.

As enjoyable as these misty eyed reminisces are, they carefully avoid any muddy swathes of personal problems by flying up the pristine narrative wings of on-field success.

Plus they fail to adequately explain why their achievements were astonishing then and practically impossible for a club of Forest’s fiscal flow to repeat now.

Other than the headline-making first million pound player signing, there’s little talk of the financial side of the game.

In a bygone world of halftime cigarettes, a diet of chip butties and booze and more days off than those spent training, tactical advice consists of ‘give it to the short fat b****** on the wing.

Or John Robertson as his parents named him.

Season ticket holders to the Brian Clough fan club won’t find anything new.

Surprisingly Old Big ‘Ead isn’t allowed the last word but the man who famously described himself as being in the top one remains as charismatic and engaging as ever.

★★★☆☆

Red Army

Director: Gabe Polsky (2015)

Russian sportsmen skate on the thin ice of Cold War politics in this cracking ice hockey documentary.

With drama on an off the rink, it’s an irrepressible combination of huge egos, fabulous action, political power games and private gain.

This film is built around interviews with the charismatic former champion player Viacheslav ‘Slava’ Fetisov.

Hugely rude, arrogant and compelling, he’s also the world’s most decorated ice hockey player.

He’s a shockingly refreshing antidote for anyone who suffers the bland, PR controlled and media-trained offerings of English football’s players and pundits.

The presentation of his achievements is one of many sequences that use humour to hurry the puck of narrative along.

In football terms Slava and his team mates play in a style best described as Total Hockey.

With even my limited exposure to or understanding of the game, the footage is as exciting and demanding as any sport I’ve seen.

Like many players Slava was specifically drafted to be eligible for the army team, it formed the vanguard of the USSR’s propaganda wing.

This relationship between the state and the individual is explored through the prism of Slava’s career, an astonishing accumulation of trophies, teams, air miles and vendettas.

With consummate timing Red Army holds back it’s best shot until the last minute.

For anyone with an interest in sport, history, politics or just wants to admire some really cool cold war kits, this is a brilliant watch.

★★★★☆  

Palio

Director: Cosima Spender (2015)

Making the UK’s Grand National look like a Blackpool beach donkey ride, this sleek documentary captures the ritual, spectacle and danger of Italy’s centuries old horse race The Palio.

Featured in the opening scenes of Bond movie Quantum Of Solace (2008), it takes place twice a summer in the centre of the ancient city Siena.

We follow young Sardinian hopeful Giovanni Atzeni who hopes to wins his first Palio.

But to do so he must overcome his formidable former mentor Gigi Bruschelli who is one win short of the all time record.

Local pride is at stake and the public are as unforgiving as the hair-raising track, inside the city’s ancient central piazza.

Staggering levels of mercenary behaviour and corruption are accepted while whips are used against fellow jockeys as much as the horses.

The jockey’s allow their egos to talk far too much but the racing speaks for itself.

 ★★★☆☆

The Wolfpack

Director: Crystal Moselle (2015)

This toothless grin of a documentary begins as a disturbing exploration of abuse and ends as a sunny coming of age tale.

The Wolfpack is the nickname of six movie-mad brothers who grew up in a high housing project on the Lower East Side of New York.

Their dad Oscar kept the only key to their threadbare apartment, only allowing his children out for essential appointments. One year they claim never to have been allowed out at all.

A committed conspiracy theorist, the Peruvian-born Oscar refuses to work. The only source of income is a government stipend their American mother Susanne receives for homeschooling the children.

With no access to the internet, the bright, articulate and creative boys entertainingly re-enact scenes from favourite films such as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

When one boy makes an illicit journey outside, it leads to their assuming increasing levels of independence.

There’s a lot of love, camaraderie and communal cooking. Their talent for mimicry asserts itself whenever they experience anxiety, seeking safety in the voices of favourite film characters.

When Oscar finally speaks on camera, he reveals himself as a pitiful person possessed of a paranoid philosophy, not the bogey-man we’ve been lead to imagine.

The Wolfpack seem to bear their parents little ill will. They’re remarkably well-adjusted for people prevented from mixing socially with anyone outside their immediate family.

Too little effort is made to tell the boys apart and there’s a failure to establish two of them are twins.

Plus we wonder how much influence the presence of the unseen documentarian is having on the behaviour of the family.

As they spread their wings and visit the cinema, the beach, the countryside, the narrative offered is suspiciously convenient for a filmmaker.

Susanne makes a phone call to her 88 year old mother, their first contact in 50 years. It seems particularly opportune rather than the organic result of a new era of domestic glasnost.

Plus the subjects’ sweet natures consistently neutralise the use of crashing guitar chords and Halloween imagery to convince us of a tragedy in progress.

★★★☆☆

Precinct Seven Five

Director: Tiller Russell (2015)

This funny, violent and arresting tale about corrupt cops in New York is the Goodfellas of police documentaries.

It follows the rise and fall of disgraced former cop Michael Dowd.

He talks, dresses and looks like one the wiseguys in director Martin Scorsese’s mob masterpiece. He even looks like Tony Darrow the actor who played Sonny Bunz, the owner of the ill-fated Bamboo Lounge. The actor was later charged with extortion.

In the early 1980’s, the 75th precinct was the most dangerous in the city, suffering 1000’s of shootings and 100’s of homicides a year. It’s described as ‘the land of f***’ by the officers’ who have to patrol it.

In extensive interviews Dowd admits to extortion, drug dealing, drug use, theft and estimates he has committed thousands of crimes as an officer.

There were bundles of cash and barrels of drugs alongside the kidnappings and murders.

Dowd claims he was taught to bend the rules in the Academy before he even graduated to the streets.

It was there he was taught the code of Omerta (silence) and a sense of brotherhood  – which Dowd exploited to make breaking the law easier.

Poor levels of police pay and the daily grind contribute to corruption. As the criminals are so much more wealthy, crime is seen to pay.

A handsome and charismatic Domenican drug dealer called Diaz cheerfully provides a criminal insight. Dowd admits to providing a police escort for him.

With it’s use of freeze frames, fast cuts and rock soundtrack, there is a similar energy to Scorsese’s finest work.

Among the talking heads, court footage, crime scene reconstructions and some terrific contemporary footage, maps detail exactly where crimes were taking place, anchoring Dowd’s storytelling in reality.

Dowd never believed he would be caught, but ruefully acknowledges his attitude may have been a consequence of the copious amount of cocaine he was consuming.

★★★★☆

Man With A Movie Camera

Director: Dziga Vertov (1929)

No-one with an interest in the history of cinema should pass on the chance of seeing this ground-breaking documentary.

It’s astonishing, dynamic, sexy, exhilarating, humorous and vital.

This hymn to the machine age has been lovingly restored and guided by the director’s own extensive notes, gifted a thrilling new orchestration.

Filmed in Odessa, Moscow and Kiev in the 1920’s, an extraordinary range of techniques are used or invented to capture every day life.

These include but are not limited to: double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles and extreme close-ups.

Christopher Nolan is not the first director to turn a city onto itself.

As we follow the man with the camera we experience the danger and fun of filmmaking. He clings to side of trains and climbs vertiginous chimney-stacks.

Watching him, watching them, we see the population endure births, deaths, divorce and weddings. We witness them enjoy sport and strive at work.

Industry, technology and machinery dominate the landscape; there are ships, trams, cars, chimneys, cranes, mines, telephones and elevators.

As the film deconstructs the mechanics of filmmaking, the camera begins to experience itself and becomes animate.

Eventually it combines with it’s human operator, evolving into cybernetic organism which fixes it’s gaze on the viewer.

Man With A Movie Camera was voted number 1 in Sight & Sound’s Poll of the Greatest Documentaries of All Time (2014) and number 8 in the Greatest Films of All Time (2012).

As Vertov says ‘I am the camera eye, I am the mechanical eye. I am the machine which shows you the world as only I can see it’

It is hellish, transcendent and extraordinarily prescient.

★★★★★

All American High Revisited

Director: Keva Rosenfeld (2015)

This warm and affectionate documentary is a surprisingly candid account of the lives of pupils who attended a US high school in the 1980’s.

Our amusement at their naivety is tempered by compassion when thirty years later the filmmakers track down various key students to catch up on their lives.

In 1984 Keva Rosenfeld shot All American High, a chronicle of the experience of the senior class at Torrance High School in California.

After a brief life in cinemas, it languished on a shelf.

Torrance High was a prosperous and predominantly white school populated by cheerleaders, jocks, prom queens, punks and preppies.

They’re indifferent to the educational exhortations of their well-meaning teachers, most of whom sport unfortunate facial hair.

In contrast to the digitised present where teenagers use smartphones to document their lives online, back then it was a novelty to record the teenage experience.

My experience of US High school is drawn exclusively from watching movies of the period, particularly the films of John Hughes such as The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986).

It’s fascinating and alarming how accurate those fictional portrayals were.

There are marching bands, parties, ball games, shopping trips, eating contests and low level political debate about the possibility of nuclear war.

At times it acts as an anthropological study of the mating rituals of American teens. Sex and drugs are dealt with in a jokey, dismissive manner – but there are hints not everybody was having a great time.

Finnish exchange student Rikki Rauhala provides narration and an outsiders eye. Later we catch up with Rikki and her teenage children as they watch the documentary together.

An optimistic teen has matured into a grounded adult but others are not so fortunate.

The filmmakers appear only briefly. They allow the students to speak for themselves and if they have a proxy mouthpiece, it’s probably the philosophical surf instructor.

★★★☆☆

Magician: The Astonishing Life of Orson Welles

Director: Chuck Workman (2015)

There’s plenty of magic but little mystery in this documentary of Orson Welles, the hugely talented cinematic showman and raconteur.

It’s an enjoyable and celebratory rocket-ride through the much repeated highlights of his extraordinary career but has nothing new to say.

Best known as the star, director, producer and co-writer of his masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941) at the precocious age of 25, it draws on photographs, illustrations, interviews, clips of his work and footage from his many TV interviews.

His work casts a long expressionist shadow from which emerge a host of top drawer filmmakers to pay homage. These include directors Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Richard Linklater.

However Tim Burton doesn’t feature which is surprising considering how much debt his work owes to Welles. The director even featured Welles (Vincent D’Onofrio) as a character in his finest work, the biopic Ed Wood (1994).

Various other screen portrayals of Welles are seen: Christian McKay in Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (2008), Jean Guerin in Heavenly Creatures (1994), Liev Schreiber in RKO281 (1999) and even John Candy in a TV skit opposite Billy Crystal.

All of which underline the stature in which he is held, as well as cementing his place in popular culture.

With the contributors agreeing Welles is a titan of cinema, no-one says a word in anger against him and there’s absolutely no muck-raking.

It’s an excellent introduction to the work of a man who above all else was a consummate if unreliable story-teller.

★★★☆☆

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films

Director: Mark Hartley (2015)

This lively documentary is a joyous journey through the trashy works of two manipulative and mould-breaking mavericks of movie-making.

Oft-maligned and not much missed by cinema audiences anywhere, Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus became a bye-word for B movie mediocrity.

With juvenile zeal they delighted in producing popcorn fodder with adult content, churning out low budget, soft-porn horror flicks typified by terrible dialogue, cheap special effects and exploitative subject matter.

Despite seemingly blinkered to the slapdash and slipshod nature of their films, they craved artistic recognition.

High-school comedy Lemon Popsicle (1978) was their first big hit and paved their way to Hollywood in 1980 where they bought the struggling Cannon Films studio.

Consummate deal-makers, they invented the concept of selling distribution rights to fund the film they were selling – before the film was made. It’s now a common practice but innovative at the time.

They would make a poster, sell the idea on the global film circuit and then go away to make the movie while inventing the film’s story on the hoof.

They were never short of ideas: Ninja 3: The Domination (1984) was a conceived as a mash-up of Flash Dance (1983) and The Exorcist (1973) – with added ninjas.

The Ninja trilogy (1981-84) were mammoth hits and hugely profitable due to their low cost base.

Whereas Sahara (1983) starring Brooke Shields was intended as a combination of The Blue Lagoon (1980), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and The Great Race (1965).

It was significantly more expensive to produce, failed to find an audience and produced large losses.

Their production methods ensured a fast turn-around from idea to screen. This allowed them to take news stories such as the nascent hip-hop street dance scene and the 1985 TWA hijacking into Breakdance (1984) and The Delta Force (1986).

Their ambition to be major players lead to a deal with the mighty MGM, but the venerable studio were constantly disappointed with the quality of the the product Cannon provided for distribution.

Quality for Cannon was always optional – except where their bare-breasted leading ladies were concerned, as anyone who has seen Bolero (1984) and Lifeforce (1985) can attest.

Their restless and unfocused ambition resulted in a massive expansion and rapid collapse – but not before they’d developed the careers of Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren.

The latter is merrily self-effacing about his roles in their movies, as are most of the interviewees; Richard Chamberlain, Bo Derek and Elliott Gould included.

There are kind words from the likes of Franco Zeffirelli who directed for Cannon but no-one has a good word for Sharon Stone.

Despite paying Sylvester Stallone double digit millions for the arm-wrestling flop Over The Top (1987), he doesn’t feel compelled to contribute.

There’s lots of nudity but no scandal; only one person is accused of being on drugs and alcohol – which seems a low figure for Hollywood.

Plus there’s a frustrating lack of financial figures and no analysis of how Cannon’s collapse affected the industry.

Electric Boogaloo includes many clips from films not least Death Wish 2 (1982) (plus sequels 3,4 & 5) Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987) and Masters of The Universe (1987).

It’s very funny and far more entertaining than watching many of the films in their entirety.

★★★☆☆

Lambert And Stamp

Director: James D. Cooper (2015)

This knockabout documentary promises to be a profile of maverick mis-matched music managers but is really a potted history of the rock band The Who.

In 1961 two assistant directors at Shepperton studios bonded over a love of French films and a desire to direct their own films.

Confident Kit Lambert was a multi-lingual, Oxford-educated, former public school boy while Chris Stamp was the working class son of tug boat pilot. He’s also the younger brother of the actor Terence – who makes a brief appearance.

They hatched a plan to find a band, promote them by making a film about them and to use that film to secure a directors deal.

The High Numbers were discovered in a bar and quickly re-named The Who. The two surviving members Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend are given a tremendous amount of screen-time to mostly contribute waffle.

It’s suggested the anger of their guitar-smashing stage performances was as an artistic representation of their experience as war babies – but this intriguing explanation passes uncommented on and unchallenged.

An unusual creative synergy between band and management obscured how successfully a manipulator Lambert was. Recognising a songwriting talent in Townshend, he nurtured the musician and treated him more favourably than the others.

There’s tantalising glimpses of roguish behaviour such as selling vinyl records on the black market to Russia from a Viennese palazzo. But the script is light on financial detail – or any detail at all and it’s too in thrall to its subject matter to achieve much objectivity.

Too many irrelevant characters appear such as ‘Irish Jack’. Plus there are many stretches where it resembles the most unquestioning of nostalgia segments on BBC’s Football Focus where former players offer rambling anecdotes and decades old banter.

There’s lots of great music but no dissenting voices; no tales of debauchery and a general lack of scurrilous muck-raking. There is an absence of outraged former colleagues, spurned former girlfriends, alimony-demanding ex-wives or such.

It ends with an acrimonious split between all parties fuelled by creative tension, heroin addiction and death.

Like the Who’s albums, there are loud, electric moments but it lacks focus and is far too long.

★★★☆☆